temptorus II

a toroidal vortex.

a vortex ring.

because they have always already occurred

the present is always already a state of anticipation.

"so, how is it that things happen? aren't we always just waiting for the--"

because they have always already occurred.

temptorus

zeno,

st. augustine,

bergson.

the present is a cavitation bubble.

it makes real and perceptible, anticipation,

in the manner that water moves out of the way ahead of something Other moving through its space.

http://eswt.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/cavitation.gif

antici

Moscow in the Spring

Please check out the Bandcamp page for this fun, noir audio drama created by Zachary George, a talented student in our department. On this page, you can hear an audio spot for it, as well as the entire first episode.

http://detectivefrankpierce.bandcamp.com/

"Jon-Erik Hexum: A Brief Tale in Three Parts"

I. Patrick

I’m trying to jerk off to her Duran Duran poster, but there’s just so much goddamned make-up and hairspray on those guys. I mean, I may as well be trying to beat off to the airbrushed cover of one of the old man’s Oui magazines that he keeps tucked away in the rafters of the garage. I found them while snooping around at age seven and became disinterested just as quickly when I discovered them to suffer from severe dick deficiency. Every once in a while, though, I still climb up there and peek in on them, like you would your grandmother laying comatose in a nursing home, just to make sure she’s still there. You know, to see if there have been any new developments. There haven’t. Maybe he’s forgotten that those musty old sluts are up there. I’m sure he has forgotten about Gran.

God, I’m distracted. I wish Kimberly would forget that I’m here.

She’s been in the bathroom for a good twenty minutes now, I can only assume wrestling with a slippery diaphragm or something. My eyes close and a vision of her in the bathroom crystallizes before me, one newly-shaven leg planted up on the sink like she’s airing out something that she left in the rain overnight. The spermicidal jellyfish slips out of her fingers onto the dirty tiled floor. She picks it up, covered in newly-trimmed pubes, and shimmies it in.

This certainly isn’t helping, so I shove that little horror movie vignette out of my head and I pull more fervently. Concentrate. David. Oh, yeah. Lee. That’s it. Roth. Now I’m firming up in my hand. Concentrate.

“Boy, you sure are excited.”

I flinch, my eyes springing open like a window shade in a Saturday morning cartoon. Adjusting to the light coming into the room from the open bathroom door, I can’t really see because of the sparkles swimming in my vision from clenching my eyes. A blurry, nude silhouette is framed in orange fluorescent light. Jon-Erik Hexum.

“What did you say?”

Even in silhouette, she looks nothing like him. But I’m desperate now.

“Did you just say Jon-Erik Hexum?” She laughs and jumps on the bed next to me.

Did I? Out loud? She pushes my hand out of the way and takes hold of my again-limp hog. I gasp, more shock than pleasure.

I squint and turn back to Duran Duran. They’re better lit now as the bathroom light splashes them like a stage spotlight. They still look like women. Like middle-aged women in a hair salon style book. Even the drummer, and he’s the only one remotely resembling a dude on one of their best days.

God, she’s slinging it around like she’s trying to twirl a drumstick over her head.

I manage to bleat out “I said, ‘Can we have some music?’” and feel the release of pressure as she unhands me. Suddenly, she’s in the floor behind me, recklessly shuffling through LP’s. A pause.

“Duran Duran?”

“WHAT? NO! God no!”

“But Steve said you loved them,” a tiny, disappointed, girlish whine at the displeasure of this bit of possible misinformation from her older brother. 

His reaction, when I told him this lie after practice, was: “So does my sister, Kimberly. Come out with Danielle and me tomorrow night and I’ll bring her.”

It’s obviously not why I told Steve that I was into them, and now I am not so sure I am. All-male band, somewhat effeminate, with full wet lips, who ask plaintively, “Is there something I should know?” Yes, Steve. There is. You should know that I’m into cock. And if the way things are going so far with your sister, Kimberly, are any indication, I am still sure of that.

Even though he didn’t get the fuck-me message I was shining brighter than the bat-signal, it resulted in a night out with him, away from school, and I was not gonna pass it up. Never mind that they were with us the whole time—his girlfriend, Danielle, and sister, Kimberly. As I survey the glossy lithograph of the band, straining against the yellowed cellophane tape affixing it to the pink bedroom wall, it strikes me that his girlfriend bears an uncanny resemblance to the guitarist.

Jesus, I just can’t look at these guys anymore. So I turn my head to look at sister, Kimberly. “Not Kim. Never Kim.” I watch her naked 13-year-old-boy body squatting over a pile of LPs. There is nothing sexy about it. I prop my head up on my arm and look closer, inspect, really, her mole-speckled ass. I glimpse her reflection in the full-length mirror on the wall in front of her and my attention is drawn to the roast-beef-sandwich-of-a-thing hovering over her records… like it’s surveying them, trying to decide for her.

I begin to superimpose on it diagrams from freshman-year health class that I had committed to memory for multiple choice exams. Where in all those folds of skin do you put your penis? I cross-reference these with half-imagined glimpses of the Oui photo spreads my father had at some point used to pleasure himself. Is that the clitoris?

I had better remember fast. That thing looks like it’s about to make its mind up on a music selection and then it’s going to turn its rapturous attention toward me. I should just do it. And do it right.I bet the walls of her vagina are tight, constrictive. I may even bring her to orgasm. Maybe even make her ejaculate.

Nope. That kind of talk is too clinical, academic. It’s not working, though my free hand is. Furiously. At my dick trying to bring it back to life.

What made Steve think that I would be a good match for her? It couldn’t have just been the poppy, British New Romantic music. My eyes clench again. Even tighter this time.

Sting.

In Dune.

She’s grown impatient with her record collection, I hear with a harrumph, followed by her walking across the room and flipping on the FM receiver. static. The Pretenders. static. Fabulous Thunde—static. The Police. Oh God. Leave it here. She does. And I’m firming up again.

I open my eyes to find her bald cunt staring me right in the face, I mean right at eye level at the edge of her bed. Her clit, at least I think that’s what it is, points at me accusingly, as if to say, “I know what you are.”

How did I end up here, peering into her womb?

I’m pretty sure I smell gin. And I am nowhere near her breath.

A terrifying thought thrusts its way into my flaccid mind: What if I miss and it goes in her urethra? Is that even possible? It can’t be good. I can’t do this. There’s just nothing to work with down there.

My brain’s performing even more poorly than my hog, but I manage to ask “Got any grass?”

“Grass?” she repeats, drawing the word out.

“You know, marijuana.”

“I know what you mean. Just who calls it that? Are you from the sixties?” She’s clearly impatient now. Her tone is surprising, considering just how much she seems to want to fuck my brains out, “No. Steve usually does, but I don’t think he’s coming back from Danielle’s…”

“Where’s he keep it?”

“His closet. But he might have taken...”

“Let’s check,” I’m already digging around in her A-ha sheets to find my briefs.

“He doesn’t like me being in his room-- anyone in his room. And he’s gonna be pissed if we smoke up his pot.”

“You just said he won’t be back,” there’s no talking me out of it. Now, I have to be in his room… his bed… his underwear drawer. I’ve pulled my own underclothes on and throw Kimberly my white, button-down shirt, “Here.” Cover up that accusatory, gin-soaked, music-loving pile of medium-rare roast beef.

But now, even though it’s hidden behind my one good shirt, I still can’t get the image of it out of my head.

“Awwww,” she’s admiring herself in the mirror, stroking the collar of my shirt at her neck and fingering the embroidered monogram.

I am up and at her bedroom door, “Where’s his room?”

Back when the name "Hanna(h)" would make you think "Barbera," not "Montana"

I've been thinking a lot about cartoons lately. So much so that I'm thinking in cartoons, a flickering parade of animated images, projected against opaque white thought bubbles.

And those images that dance before me are the ultimate examples of "Disneying" narrative, reducing every story to a moral duality of good versus evil, love conquering hate. Cartoons were Hanna(h) Montanaing children's entertainment long before Billy Ray ever had a glint of lust in his eyes. The white-washing typically occurred in story, with sanitized plots and simple situational comedy. The studios turned the occasional blind eye to cartoons tackling the real issues, like law enforcement's extended investigation into a string of pick-a-nick basket larcenies. These were, however, exceptional. For the most part, cartoons were a lesson in justice served and evil punished.

Perhaps the greatest dumbing down of material in childrens' entertainment occurred in character. Most of the cartoon characters from my childhood were nothing but stereotypes. Looney Toons was filled with them. Foghorn Leghorn was nothing but a good ol' ill-bred, poorly-educated, down-home country hick. Speedy Gonzalez, his own thick, Spanish accent and vocabulary presented for laughs, was accompanied by his lazy cousin, Slowpoke Rodriguez. And, clearly, Pepe Le Pew was a sexual harasser. That cat never wanted his advances.

Hanna(h) Barbera characters had even less subtlety. Huckleberry Hound, although a sheriff in the Old West, for some reason had the slow stigmatic drawl of the deep south. Honk Kong Fooey's every screen entrance was accompanied by a reverberating gong. Snagglepuss was pink, had a lisp, spent part of the day in a cage, and dressed like a Chippendales dancer. No, he wasn't gay.

Stop-motion animation has also been on my mind, but not because of a tendency toward indoctrinating the idea that the Other can be neatly divided into types and is here to entertain us. Animation is really a time-elimination operation. Not just any time is eliminated, however, but a specific kind of time: non-narrative time. This is the time unfolding in-between the key beats of narrative; this is a liminal time. Non-narrative time necessarily produces narrative time, which is nothing but a spine of sought-out and connected beats, key moments, form. Non-narrative time is real time, measurable in labor and production, and yet it is time that we discard, suppress, willingly forget, sacrifice to the narrative. It's time that exists, but that is literally obscene ("off-scene") in hopes that it will not attract our attention. We're complicit in this operation; we don't want to experience non-narrative time because it reveals the illusion and obscures the spectacle. 

Narrative time is time made spectacular, cut down to the interesting and entertaining bits. It's time edited. It's the product of labor, the strip-mining of coal while looking for diamonds. All else is discarded because the only part that is of value to us is the diamond, the pleasurable illusion, the gem of story. And then, only valuable to us until the next diamond is brought to the surface, followed by the next, in a prescripted cause and effect chain, a diamond choker. It is an order imposed, and the result presented for our distracting entertainment.

The persistence of vision, the illusion upon which animation, and spectacle, is based, has its counterpart in narrative. While our mind blinks to obscure non-narrative time, the imprint of our last beat of narrative time remains there, a distraction from the labors of non-narrative time. It fades only slightly before we're presented with the next beat of narrative time to hold in mind and provide a distracting spectacle. We grasp onto the narrative image, forgetting that the flow of time continues until it becomes time to replace our current narrative image with the next.

We might, however, form our own connective patterns if we can survey the whole timeline. Searching from outside of time, we might find a natural pulse, organic, rather than one constructed and imposed. We, instead of ignoring non-narrative time, might examine it closely enough to recognize Aristotle's unity of time is characteristic of all time. All time is narrative. Not all narrative time has to be spectacular, however. Perhaps if we, as audience, choose for ourselves the key moments of time, the beats, the form, perhaps if we become our own narrators rather than accepting the narrative time that has been selected for us and presented to us as a distraction from the real, then, maybe then, we have the antidote to spectacular time.

To counteract spectacular time, we have to step out of time, in an off-rhythm, syncopated marching to Thoreau's drummer or a wild and spasmodic Butoh dance. We must play with all our being, and not accept leisure time as our time. We have to play and we have to laugh.

A cliché a day

keeps the agent away.

Write like no one is watching.

Rewrite like you have an audience.

Time deaths

It is not we who are dying from the moment of birth, but time, from the moment of its birth.. in the sense of a dramatic narrative with its unity of action. The whole, relentless plot moving forward to its inevitable conclusion. (Inevitable is the one chosen from among unlimited possibilities.) But also each individual moment drama leading into a subsequent moment drama, a unique encapsulated pastpresentfuture. Fragmentary time; as fragmentary as these sentences, each dying off in its own abbreviated

And objective time is, thus, not, as we once thought, the horizontal index vector, its origin unknown and somewhere to the left, that moves rightward through a space. It is instead a mirror image of the subjective time vector, which Zettl calls vertical, but in truth runs concurrently with objective time along the horizon and then drops and rises as our engagement varies, felt time diverging from clock time. The object of its drive? Zero time-- that point at which objective and subjective times intersect. Zero time on the objective vector, however, means death. The moment at which nothing changes, all time stops.

Death time encompasses that vector of felt time and its concatenated partner in which time drops off as it dies. The arrow falls off vertically as objective time dies, never to reach its destination along the distant horizon of the right. A destination of no destination, since time is not a bounded line segment of two points. As the arrow falls off, a possible direction is shot out along each point in the curve toward ever diminishing possibilities that have already been pruned from the sphere of light of all possible future moment dramas. Each moment dying off until the end of time. Of that time. That particular time moment. And on along the pulse.

Each moment drama dies off through denouement only to be the catalyst for the next moment drama. That next may be a moment whose drama may be that it is the last. And so the whole plot dies. But, it too, is the catalyst for the next plot. That next plot may be a plot whose drama may be that it is the last. And so the whole story dies. But, it too, is the catalyst for the next story.  That next story may be a story whose drama may be that it is the last. And so we exist. Our livesanddeaths fluctuating with the aesthetic pulse of time, inextricable from its formmessages in a hierology of destiny. (Destiny is the one chosen from among unlimited possibilities.) A book of metaesthysics. The book of the dead. A book, because the message is dead and so, too, must be the medium.

Simultaneous Narration

I've started this blog as one means of production of self over time. This construction will never be me and yet will be the only I that is ever really me. I have destroyed me, freeing me to rebuild me as an aesthetic self. You read, therefore I am.